I hate them. I hate glitter, stencils, paints, crayons, construction paper, felt, and glue. I hate Michael’s and Jo-Anne Fabric. I hate all of it. I do not do crafts with the children.

The only thing I hate more than crafts is when people tell me how “easy” and “fun” crafting is and how I’m probably better at it than I think. They’re wrong. I’m as bad at crafts as I think I am. Also, I hate doing it. Can’t we just sit around and drink wine and chat? Why do we have to be doing something all the time? Or any of the time?

The only thing I hate more than people who tell me I should like crafts is when I am forced to do crafts.

It happens. It pisses me off every time.

Monday morning there was a sign outside the twinkies pre-school classroom that their “paper bag costumes” for the “paper bag parade” were due Friday. This annoyed me for two reasons. First, I hate that we can’t just call it a Halloween Parade. I try to be sensitive to other religious beliefs. I really do. But shouldn’t there be some kind of majority rule? Should we all have to give up a traditional Halloween (Christmas, Birthday, or Easter) celebration because of the beliefs of a small minority of people?

Do we have to add insult to injury by forcing all the parents (Read: Mom’s) to do a craft? Frick on a stick. I hate crafts.

I did some internet research and came up with stuff like this:

There is no chance I could make something like that.

I asked the boys what they wanted their costumes to be, Reese said “Spider-Man!” I told him I couldn’t make Spider-Man. He said, “OK, you can just make Batman then.”

No.

The bag is square so I suggested an iPhone or SpongeBob. Reese said his friend Chandon was being SpongeBob so he wanted to be Patrick. I figured I could do Patrick. Jackson said he wanted to be “GREEN SpongeBob.”

Sure, whatever kid.

Making the costumes was the worst 20 minutes of my life. Seriously. Getting the twinkies to try on and take off the paper bags without destroying them was nearly impossible. I got paint all over my clothes, the table, my hands, and the computer. The boys kept climbing all over me and trying to mix orange and blue to make red. They must have eaten the red paint.

Five minutes into it I almost called the pre-school and offered to just buy everyone in the class a costume at Target. Instead I took a deep breath and focused on my craft.

This is the picture I used for inspiration.

These are my costumes.

Nailed it.